


Plug in, Baby

by vinnie2757



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, also alfred is mixed race and arthur gets to have a hot wife, assasins creed crossover, but regardless arthur never gets a hot wife, if they arent dead yet they will be soon, so he gets one this time, tbh i dont know how revalent mixed race alfred is but i feel it should be more so, that is more than he usually gets, there will be animus shenanigans, there will be backstabbing and bitching and side-swapping like nobody's business
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2616209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Subject 1701 dies on the job, as it were, Abstergo goes through another seventy-five Subjects before finding Subject 1776, Alfred Franklin Jones. He has the key to the missing Piece of Eden, but they do not reckon on the Assassins working from within their ranks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plug in, Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on FF.N before Revelations came out, it's a two year old disaster that needed a desperate overhaul and rewrite.  
> So I did that. And made it better.
> 
> And sadder.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ifran is asked questions, and Alfred tries to find answers

**Chapter One: Access the Animus**

 

_“He that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow."_

**Ecclesiastes, 1:18**

 

**Masyaf, July 1192**

Fire stands bright against the sky, brighter than the sun, white-hot against bleached sandstone. Nearby, grass is brown, scorched by the heat. Blood splashes red against it all, against buildings and grass and the dust of the path through the village to which the fire had been set, against the shining armour and the sweaty linen of robes.

Sequestered away at the top of the tallest tower, a fable not yet told, two men stand side-by-side as their home burns.

No, that is wrong, for it is not the home of both. Just of one. One was born here, and the other will die here, atop this tower.

For a while now, as they stand watching the war waging below them, there has been silence unlike any other. It is peaceful, in a way, an easy calm between brothers. But that belies the bitterness and the anger that lurks beneath their skin, bites at their ankles as though it were an untrained hound. They are puppies in this war, barely more than boys.

The boys, of course.

Knowing that he will die, the older of the two men atop the tower asks, ‘Will you raise my sons?’

The fact that he is to die is precisely why he brought his children here. The three sons, so young, toddlers, still stumbling over their feet. One is an infant. Quite how he survived the journey is beyond understanding. The dead man had smiled on seeing his son squall, handed him to one of the girls safe in the fortress to be raised away from this vile, pointless war fought by old men in towers not unlike this one. He had not betrayed them, but he was born of another creed.

His sons were innocent, but he was not.

‘I will raise them as my own,’ the other replied.

A taller, younger man, with no children to his name, whatever name that was. He was still so young, a child by all accounts. Born of this village, he had known almost no other life, snatching glimpses of impossible possibilities on missions in robes he did not belong in. The only robes he needed were those on his back, sun-bleached linen white as the stone, leather well-worn and flaking in the crease of his ankle, his belly, his wrist.  

Somewhere below them, a woman screams. The man to die takes a breath, as though steeling himself against sickness. The younger does not look to be fazed. His gut aches, but his face remains as broad and sun-loved as ever.

‘Thank you.’

The words sound choked, as though it hurts to say them.

Assassins should not sound in pain to give gratitude where it is deserved, and the younger will never forget that the older man stood beside him in the same robes, just as sun-bleached, just as worn, is not an Assassin. Men are born to their creed, they do not live and die under another flag.

And yet here he stands.

‘They killed her,’ the older says, and moves to sit, perching on the edge of the tower like a bird ready to take flight. He has been taught well, but his shoulders are broad of armour, his feet flat like those of the Knight he had once been. He will never be an Assassin the way his companion is. ‘The Templars. No, no. Not the Templars. Just one.’

‘I know,’ the younger replies, and leans against the stone with his arms crossed, a feigned ease that does not disguise the tense muscles in his shoulders, the strain of his robes against them. ‘I read the letters. Al Mualim did not take pleasure in it.’

‘Al Mualim takes pleasure in nothing.’ But there was no bite to the words. Just sadness. ‘Promise me that my children will be safe. I will not let our deaths be in vain. My – our sons must live. They cannot join us in Heaven as they are now.’

‘They won’t,’ comes the promise, a strong, broad, killing hand clapping to a shoulder. ‘I swear, as a Brother, I will not allow your children to come to harm. If they take to the Creed, I cannot stop them. I will not stop them. But I will not allow them pain until they are of age.’

‘And what is age these days? Boys in armour, killing old men in robes. There is no age to murder, to war. There is just death, and it comes for all men, boys or not.’

It hurts, somewhere, to know how much this man has lost, and he – the younger – feels it so deep that he thinks he will feel it every time he meets the eyes of his sons. Already the twins, the young boys who understand that their mother is dead and that they will never live in safety so long as they have the blue eyes and sunshine hair of Christians, look like their father, sharp of jaw and nose, just as messy-haired and pale of skin. They could be any Christian boy in Europe, but they are here, in Masyaf, where they will learn to kill the men that killed their mother.

‘Will they understand what came of me? Probably not. But tell them I was not a traitor. Do not let them despise me.’

He’d been talking, then, but the younger man had not been listening. That was to be expected, and the older man does not begrudge him in the least. He had been talking just to fill the silence between them, to drown out the screaming and the clashing of steel as it grew ever closer. He had never intended to be listened to, which is how he wants it. No one wants to hear an old man prattle on about his failures. It is the failing of man, to rely on hindsight as they approach death.

‘What is Heaven like?’ the younger Assassin asks; raised to believe in no faith, he knows nothing of the Christians beyond that they are enemies of the Muslim state, that Christians are Templars and are therefore not to be trusted.

‘I do not know,’ the older man replies with a sigh. It is a very world-weary sigh, as though he has thought about the matter for so long and is no closer to the answer. ‘But Marie will be there. I know that. That is all I need.’

‘I would have liked to meet her.’

He has never seen a man so in love before. It is almost beautiful. How could he not want to see the woman who inspired such devotion?

‘You would have liked her. She’d have mothered you as if you were her own.’

‘Did she mother you?’

‘Sometimes, yes.’

There is something very fond in the way that the older Assassin looks at him as he hops off the battlement, standing and dusting down his robes. As the younger straightens, wrist flicking as if to release his blade, his elder reaches up to brush his hood back, thumb under his blue eyes, the blue of sky and sea.

‘You remind me of my boys,’ he murmurs, brushes through his hair as if to straighten it. The sweat just makes it messier. ‘They could grow up to be you one day.’

He almost sounds like he is proud of that thought, like this is something to be proud of your child becoming.

‘I will keep them alive long enough that they can decide whether that is what they wish to become.’

‘Good. I’m glad. You will be a good Mentor one day. You will train them and many others like them well.’

A clash of steel sounds too close this time; a knight has been thrown against the wall of the tower. It does not rattle the old stones, but the vibration can be felt through the soft leather of their boots.

‘Burn my body,’ the older says when they have turned to face one another again. ‘Do not let them have it. Let me die as an Asssasin, not as a Templar.’

‘Can you reach Heaven if your body is burnt?’

The man smiles, reaches for the bracer and the blade attached. ‘I am already there.’

He has been trained to kill since birth, and his blade meets no resistance as it angles up, between ribs and into the heart. Holding his elder upright as he chokes on blood, as he drowns and bleeds out and dies, he listens to the slowing pulse, the huffs of breath hot and blood-wet against his neck. When the man is dead, he lays his body out, arms crossed over his chest, hands flat against his heart. One of his fingers is missing, on the right hand.

(Later that missing digit will be replaced by a burnt ring. Sometimes, that ring will be hidden behind another, a ring of gold or silver. Maybe there will be a diamond, maybe a sapphire, maybe a carved inscription. But mostly, there will be no ring, for the woman who whom that ring had been sworn would be dead, and the man that wore it broken.)

He is left-handed – was, he _was_ left-handed. His blade had been on the other arm, and the surviving Assassin removes it; why waste good armaments? The blade can be given to his eldest son when he comes of age, after all. That would be what the now-dead father would have wanted.

There is no fire nearby, but he has no intentions of dying, of letting any other up here. He will return at dusk and burn the body as instructed. For now, he has duties to attend to. Templars to kill. Children to save.

Flipping his hood up, he spares a glance back from the end of the ledge, crooked with decades of pigeon shit and old rope. The dead man could be asleep, just resting in the afternoon sun.

Taking a life has never left him more hollow, and he leaps for the hay, leaves the feeling behind, fills himself with air and purpose and _promise_.

 

**New York City, August 2012**

There is no blood on his hands, but as Alfred Franklin Jones wakes sobbing and scrambling out of his blankets, he can almost see it. A red light blinks somewhere outside, and in the gaps of his blinds, it stains his hands as he stumbles to the bathroom, collapsing over the toilet.

He chalks it up to the take-out he’d eaten last night, on badly cooked and reheated chicken noodles. Even as he struggles to his feet to flush and wash his hands and face, he knows that he’s lying to himself.

In his reflection, with the dark smudges of pouchy skin beneath his eyes and a week’s worth of stubble on his jaw, he almost looks like his father. He has his mother’s eyes, though. That is the only part of him he can bear.

Hair sticking at odd angles or plastered to his brow, he sets about brushing his teeth, scrubbing until his gums are bleeding. Still the taste is not gone, and he swallows two capfuls of mouthwash. It makes his throat burn, his stomach churn, but he can’t taste the blood and vomit now, and that is something.

He sighs a little, splashes his face one last time, and goes to get a bottle of water out of the fridge. Anything to get his mind off the dream. It was not the first time he’d dreamt of a town in the almost-desert, dry and sandy and with fire burning on every roof. He’d dreamt of steel before, but never like this. He’d never killed a man with his own hands. No, not his hand. His dream’s hands.

He had never killed a man. Hell, he’d never thrown a punch meant for a flesh-and-blood human. Just a canvas sack filled with sand.

But even now, he felt hollow, as though he had known the man he killed for years. Not even that. Fire-forged friends, he thinks. They’d seen shit together, and now they were together until the end. Well, the older man’s end.

He thinks about that. He’d promised to raise the man’s children. It had been his voice, his words. Would he, Alfred, be a good father figure? Was he capable of looking after children? He was good with them, sure, but could he look them in the eye when he’d been the one to kill their father?

Slamming the fridge shut, he chides himself for entertaining the thought. It was just a dream, too many late night video games. Too many conspiracy theories. They were all over the internet at the moment, chain messages from some independent server.

What did that mean? It sounded Italian, but Alfred can’t speak Italian outside of the butchered stereotypical Italian in parodies and comedy. Maybe even Latin. Latin seemed more likely. It kind of sounds like ‘erudite’. It probably does not mean erudite. But it sounds like it. Erudite means well-spoken. Learned. Erudito, the learned one.

‘Conspiracy nuts,’ he huffs, as though it is all a joke, and he goes to sit in bed and finish off the water.

Staring at the wall does him no good, of course, but it is better than nothing. He can count the chips in the paint and not think about the way he could still feel his Brother choking out his last breaths against his neck, the hot, wet splatter of bloody spit against his throat, drying as stains in the sun of Masyaf.

That was where his dream had been. Masyaf. That’s somewhere in the Middle East, he’s sure. He’s never been outside of America. He thinks of his father, of his last words to his son as Alfred called him a thousand names and assured the man that had given him life that he would never _ever_ return to the place he had been born.

All but a reservation, he thinks. It had been a farm, people hidden away from normal society, segregated and demeaned and forced to live by their own means. No Abstergo products allowed in the confines. Which meant almost no technology, almost no brands. Brands, as though there was ever more than Abstergo. It is just Abstergo, nothing else.

What was this, some Shyamalan film? The Amish? No, no, he thinks, he wasn’t Amish, he wasn’t in a tense, confusing mystery film. He was just on the Farm, full to the brim with conspiracists readying for the end of the world and no barns for cows.

He cannot hate his father, not really, he was raising his son as he had been raised, but Alfred does not believe in conspiracies.

That’s why he’s been ignoring Erudito’s chain messages. Though there are no other addresses CC’d in, he’s sure that they’re a chain message, because there is no other explanation for the garbage appearing in his inbox.

 

 **From:** Erudito [ACCESS DENIED]

 **To:** Alfred F Jones [a.franklin @ outmail. com]

 **Date/Time:**   30/07/2012 10:39 PM

 **Subject:** Ancestry

 

Don’t ignore your memories! Your dreams are important. I’d advise you get out of town as soon as you can, kid. It’s not safe here, and it never was. Keep an eye out, they’ll find you. It won’t be pretty. [ _Here, there is a link, to a downloadable file, which Alfred is not stupid enough to click. If he had, he would have been presented with the bodies of failed experiments, with the bodies of people who had been burnt out by the Animus, with numbers branded into their hands, from 1541 through to 1701.]_

Next time, stay with your dad. He knows what’s up.

: )

 

Part of Alfred wants to believe it, because they are all thoughts that he’s had before, but he doesn’t want to admit that he is _scared_. He is not scared of the monsters his father used to tell him about, the monsters that lurked in the shadows to kill and maim and steal them away as if they never existed.

Sometimes, he reads those emails from Erudito. These days, they are the only emails he gets. His father has long since stopped trying – though Alfred had changed his email address several times, Erudito and his father both managed to find him – and he has no friends, not really. So junk mail aside, there are only emails from Erudito to read. He thinks about how the mysterious person – boy, girl, mineral, animal, vegetable? He doesn’t know, and that scares him too – managed to know what got under his skin.

Who were _they_? Abstergo. His father had always warned him about Abstergo, called them vile names in a language Alfred did not need to speak to understand. He had been warned since birth to never leave the safety of the Farm. It was the only thing they – the inhabitants – had that they could call their own. The only place not owned by Abstergo.

The apartment Alfred lives in now is owned by Abstergo; their logo stands bright and white like bleach against the dark wood and stone of the building. On every apartment door and on every non-apartment window, the logo is there, a reminder.

Alfred feels sick again and goes to sit by the toilet.

He’s never eating at that Thai place again.

Whilst he’s there, he thinks about how Erudito’s emails have been getting more and more frantic, begging him to leave, to get out before their Friends finds him. He knows that he means Abstergo, because who else would be their friend? In early, chain-link emails, Erudito had been flaunting their disdain for Abstergo, had been all but CC’ing the company into the emails. Alfred knows that his emails are tapped – everyone’s are – but there is no way to block Erudito’s emails. Even if he reports the address for spam, a different address comes through. He cannot stop it, so he lets it happen.

Somehow, he thinks Abstergo has stopped looking, or is not seeing these emails. Some of the things have been so inflammatory that Alfred is surprised his door has not been kicked down.

(Not least because the name on the lease is not the name on the email address. That would do his father proud, wouldn’t it? Being caught after he was taught _so well_.)

Downing the last of the water, Alfred crawls back into bed and watches the blinking red light through his blinds. It is not at all like the blood it had been when he woke. Rolling onto his side, he goes back to sleep.

 

**Masyaf, September 1192**

 

The little one has just finished his first year. Standing there and watching the boy totter a few steps towards his big brother before falling, the Assassin feels fond. The little one has not called him Father, Papa, he has not been given that name. He thinks the twins have stopped him from doing so, because they know that this scant figure with his dark skin and his beaked hood is not their Papa, and they assure the little one that Papa will be coming soon.

He does not know if the twins are lying or not.

He brings the little one a bag of knucklebones. They are not human bones, no matter how much he wished they were – bring him Templar bones, he had thought, teasing himself as he followed the shadow of a Target, teach him from a young age – but the Mentor would not allow it, and he was instead made to ask the butcher, polite as ever, for sheep bones. The Mentor had contact with Europe, had learnt the differences of raising Christian children to better supply Masyaf, and he had been told about the games the Christian children would play.

Naturally, the little one would rather chew on the knucklebones than play with them. The twins take care of their toddling, babbling brother.

He watches them try to teach the little one how to play the game, but he is barely a year gone, he has no co-ordination to catch the little moving bones. The twins get more fun from it. That is fine by him, he wants them to have the ability to catch and throw with deathly ease.

Whenever the twins play in front of the little one, he claps his chubby little hands and babbles in glee. The Assassin with his dark skin and beaked hood wonders if his Brother would be proud of the job he is doing.

 

**New York City, August 2012**

Alfred is nineteen, and he has only been away from the Farm for six months. It was not a home, and he will never call it a home. His father was there, his mother long since gone. Dead, he thinks, but he cannot remember if he killed her or whether it was the conspiracy. Probably, he thinks, the conspiracy. Paranoid people end up killing themselves, and he has memories of her, so she can’t possibly have died when he was born.

He doesn’t remember if his mother was a Christian.

It was unseemly, he was sure, no matter what she was. Christian or not, she was dead now, and his father had – had what? Had he loved her? Once, maybe, but by the time Alfred was old enough to ask questions, his feelings had dissipated into an old fondness. By then, all he was, all told, was a bitter, angry old man with too many open palms and too few open arms.

Did he think that by coming to the outside world, to this Abstergo-run simulation of a city, he would find his mother? Yes. Had he realised that on doing so? No.

Not that it really matters, since he doesn’t even know her name to know where to begin looking. And even if he did, he doubts she was using her real name any more than he was. Why would she? His father could find her then.

On waking the second time, he showers, and takes his time shaving the dark scruff on his chin. He does not like that he needs to shave, and as much as he would like to grow a beard and hide his face further, he is not old enough, healthy enough, to grow a decent beard. So he shaves it off, spends as much time out of the sun as possible, desperate to pale down his skin. He can do nothing about the shape of his face, about the saturation of his cells, but he can make himself look white. Pass as a white boy. He remembers that he needs to bleach his hair again and scrawls a note to himself on the back of his hand. His dark circles have not improved, but that’s fine, the pouches of bruised skin makes him look older than he is, makes him look as though he is in his twenties.

Nineteen is too young to be out in the world, but like so many others, he has no choice.

It’s a solitary existence, working by cash, paying without cards. He has no card to his name, fake or real or stolen. He has nothing except what he pays for, except for the money in his pocket. It is not much, but it’s enough.

(Erudito advised him of that, told him that their Friends could not track him so easily if he did not leave a trail. The apartment was an unfortunate side-effect, and could not be helped. But nobody had questioned him about it, and he laughs to himself sometimes, because this is almost a life.)

He looks at schooling sometimes, but he knows that he can’t go, that it would be too easy to track him. There would be too many lies to tell, too many lives on the line. He could endanger an entire course worth of people if he attended even one class. It wasn’t worth it. He could learn by reading. It was how he’d always learnt. He had read and read and read until he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and then he had stared at the stars and counted off the constellations until he fell asleep and almost got trampled by a horse.

Looking at the clock, he groans. He’s slept the day away and in two hours, he has to go to work. He has to go and pull pints and get hit on (and hit at) for six hours, and he hates it. He _hates_ it. But there is nothing else an uneducated nineteen-year-old with no high school report card or exam results to give him a better paid, better timed job. He would like work that was not repetitive, but short of taking up his father’s deluded, conspiracy-driven, _insane_ cause, he was doomed to monotony.

Groaning some more, he drags himself to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich and shove it in his mouth. Just ham and bread, but better than nothing. Why waste what little money he had?

Erudito tried to tell him to take better care of himself, looking like a charity case was not going to help him, but Alfred had not known how to do that, and his mysterious spammer – his stalker, for how else was any of this possible – had not had an answer either.

Work then, and then he supposes sleep would also be a good idea. Groceries after that, a shower and maybe a movie. Not pirated, because they can track that shit now. So no, not piracy. Good old fashioned rental store. Maybe a pizza. But maybe home cooking. Take-out probably isn’t a good idea after that Thai place last night.

Grousing, as though personally offended by this turn of events, Alfred pulls on the black polo for the bar, and heads to work.

 

**Trenton, New Jersey, December 1776**

The forest is so silent that he can almost hear his breath turning to snow in front of his face, hear the crackle as it forms clouds before him. The fog is thick, ice on every leaf and dusting the bark and dirt until it looks like silver, coins scattered amongst the wreckage. He sits crouched in an old tree, blending into the sky with his cloud-grey robes.

The red sash and blue piping do not help, nor do the shiny brass buttons, but the grey is enough.

Anyone who glanced up might think he was a bird, so long as they did not look close enough.

Yesterday, the Hessians celebrated Christmas. He does not care about Christmas, for he does not believe in God to believe in his son. He does not believe in this Christian nonsense, for he cares only about the death of the Templars under his blades.

Were he to care about Christmas, that is all he would ask for. Them to drop incapacitated at his feet so that he could deal the finishing blow.

He cracks his neck and waits. He waits until his fingers are blue for the ache of the cold, but still he does not move. Washington had said many things, and he had believed none of them, but he could not deny the man the aid he had requested. Their paths lay in line, his Brother had said that once, before he’d been forced to end his life. Their goals were the same, and so they came to be in the same place.

_Work together for the good of the many to the weakness of the few._

That was not what he cared about, but he wouldn’t complain. Festive spirit and all that.

The Royalists come marching past, a parade. He thinks, as he watches them from beneath the beak atop his hood, shadowed from snow and glittering sun, that they missed a messenger, telling them that today was Christmas.

The Royalists celebrate Christmas, right?

After some moments, the last of the parade marches past, and the drums at the front of the line begin to fade. He waits, watches to see which of the stragglers lingers longest.

One of them stops for a piss, thinking he won’t be caught.

His hatchet sinks deep into the underside of the man’s ear, and the force of the blow sends them both tumbling into the snow, silent as a breeze.

 

**New York City, August 2012**

 

Alfred wakes with a bad taste in his mouth. There are fingers in his hair, cool and firm, rubbing in all the right places. It feels a little like they’re measuring out his roots, looking at the awful bleach dye-job he’d done in the kitchen sink three weeks ago.

‘What happened?’ he slurs, makes a few rude noises as he tries to lick the taste out of his mouth. 

‘I’m sorry,’ comes a voice from somewhere over his shoulder. Probably attached to the fingers. It’s a low, level voice, soft with gentility. ‘I told them to be subtle.’

There is silence for a moment.

‘They drugged you, Alfred. You’ve been asleep for a full day. You’re at. You’re at the Abstergo facility in New York.’

He grunts and tries to roll over. The fingers leave his hair to take his shoulder, help him shift onto his back.

‘Hello,’ says the voice, and Alfred blinks up at him.

He’s familiar, in a way. Like seeing the same person at the supermarket frowning over the price of milk for weeks in a row. It’s older than that, though, he thinks, looking at the pale skin with the bluish-grey smudges, the reddish end of a long, straight nose. Thick eyebrows, drawn together in a frown. He knows that face from a thousand years ago, a memory from a dream he had as a child, a face in a newspaper photograph.

‘Why am I here?’ he asks, and Eyebrows frowns.

‘You are a, um, a candidate for the Animus Program. They – the doctors – they want to see if you can access your ancestor’s memories.’

Something is pressed into his hands, and the cool metal and glass feels like his glasses. He blinks at them, tries to focus long enough to unpeel the arms and get them on his face. It doesn’t make it any less blurry, and he tells Eyebrows that.

‘Mm,’ he says, and that’s all the response he gives.

Alfred isn’t impressed.

Still, at least it seems like he’s doing _something_ about it, getting up and pacing around until he brings a glass of water and some painkillers back with him from some side room Alfred hadn’t even noticed was there. Then again, he’d not looked around.

After the water and the painkillers have sunk in, seeped into his bloodstream and cleared his vision a little, he looks at Eyebrows a little more objectively. Around his neck, there is a lanyard with an ID card, presumably to get into locked rooms and assure strangers that he’s a worker.

Kirkland, the card reads in small, bold capitals. Arthur J Kirkland.

‘What does the J stand for?’ he asks, and Arthur hums.

‘James,’ he replies. ‘The F?’

‘Franklin. How do you know my real name is Alfred? The name on the lease is Thomas.’

‘Because Abstergo aren’t stupid,’ Arthur shrugs, and gets to his feet, dusting down neatly pressed trousers and a truly ugly grey sweater. Alfred thinks, privately, that green or red would look better. Grey just makes him look washed out. ‘They knew you left the Farm as soon as you did. It took them a while to track you down once you disappeared, but they knew. Erudito isn’t as well-hidden as he believes he is.’

It sounded very much like Arthur had been rehearsing that speech, and Alfred watches him from the corner of his eye as he too gets up and stretches. He wonders, as Arthur leads him out of the chamber and into a warmly lit room with a beautiful vista of the New York skyline and the bay beyond, how long he had been sat there, ready to have Alfred wake.

‘So what do you do?’ he asks, and Arthur glances over his shoulder at him.

‘I work as a technician,’ he says, ‘I supervise the Animus, make sure the sub – the _participants_ – don’t have any negative experiences.’

‘Sub?’

Arthur glances at the door.

‘Subjects,’ he says, and turns to the massage-porno-robot bed like a sore thumb in the middle of the room. Alfred stares at it.

‘The fuck is that?’ he asks, because asking what he means by subjects seems ill-timed.

‘That,’ comes a new voice, an older man’s voice, gravelly and worn with age and work and the kind of drinks Alfred might have served him only a half-hour before closing, ‘is called the Animus, Mister Jones. It allows us to access the memories stored in our DNA, the genetic information stored within that contains the information of our ancestors.’

Such a PR spiel, such a joke. Alfred frowns at the white-templed old fart in his long coat and badly-knotted tie, watches him approach. From the corner of his eye, Arthur very deliberately avoids looking at either of them, bent over a screen attached to the porno-bed. Animus. Whatever.

Alfred watches him, and then watches the Doctor, watches them skirt around each other. It is clear, even to Alfred, who has been desperately trying, over the last six months, to unlearn everything his parents taught him, to unlearn everything about the Assassins, to unlearn all the observational and sensory tricks his father had taught him, that they – Arthur and the Doctor – they _despise_ each other. It is so obvious that he’s surprised there hasn’t been a fire yet. He wonders who would win in a fight.

Arthur is talking, but Alfred is considering the width of Arthur’s shoulders, the shape of his knuckles. He doesn’t look like a fighter, but that sweater _is_ kind of baggy. He might be a brawler, good in a pub fight with broken bottles and a wooden stool.

The Doctor is older, but age has experience.

His money’s on Arthur though, those are some broad knuckles, a strong fist. His left hook must be something to watch out for.

‘Get in the Animus, Mister Jones,’ the Doctor snaps, and Alfred blinks stupidly.

He must be the all-around best subject they’d ever subjected to this garbage.

‘Alfred,’ Arthur says, softer, a hand reaching over the bed to where Alfred stands dumbly, staring at the flickering lights and the moulded plastic and foam. Arthur’s arms are not long enough to reach, but the gesture is nice enough. ‘We don’t have much time, and we have important research to do. Help us. Get in the Animus.’

There is something about the way that he meets Alfred’s gaze, so level, so sharp. His eyes are the kind of green Alfred has only ever seen in the bar, the absinthe that sits on the highest shelf and is only served on special occasions, exists mostly as decoration. Alfred considers Arthur in terms of drink, thinks for all the absinthe of his eyes, the pouches under them, the pallor of his skin, the haunted, intense expression, desperate to convey more than he can say with words, it’s not his drink.

Rum, he thinks, a pirate’s drink. Pirates are cowards, running from everything to avoid the responsibility of adulthood, lost boys with no fathers, fathers with lost sons.

‘Did you know your dad?’ Alfred asks.

Arthur rolls his eyes, and tells him to get in the Animus.

Alfred shrugs, and does so. There is no need to be so hard with him, he says as he settles back on the uncomfortable porno-robot-bed, and Arthur sighs, starts typing with one hand, tapping at the screen with the other.

For a few moments, Alfred watches him, and then a screen raises out of the bed and curls around his head, and he gets distracted by that instead. Things – too many things, glaring against the lenses of his specs – flash across the clear plastic, the ripple of DNA strands curling around each other, pulling apart, the Abstergo logo flashing, rotating, a loading screen.

Arthur James is a good, strong name, he thinks, much stronger, much more upstanding and noble than Alfred Franklin. Arthur James sounds like a knight, defending the kingdom of his family with sword and fist and the angriest gaze. Alfred Franklin, in comparison, sounds flighty, the wide wings of eagles with no nest and no family, no roots to hold them still, hold them true.

And then, somewhere in the middle of a pop-up pointing to a DNA bar, like some kind of chapter summary or episode plotline, he sinks into nothing, into that same fugue as before, the weightlessness of dreams and a sleep so heavy he can feel no pain.

 

**Jerusalem, April 1191**

 

He is young, so young, barely more than a boy, but he has already learnt so much, taken lives and stalked, followed and listened and observed more than any normal boy. Nineteen is long since an adult, but the Mentor believes him too naive to be made an Assassin proper. He is not so unskilled as to not already be a master, to be a veteran of a war that had been fought long before his father’s father had been born, whoever his father had been.

The Mentor said once that he felt Ifran has more skills than any other Assassin his age, in his generation. If he had a few more wits and a little more flatness to his soles, he may have been one of the youngest Master Assassins to have graced the Masyaf fortress in years, if not ever. As it was, he was still doing his own investigations. Not to say that he didn’t _like_ investigations.

He loved them, the freedom to roam the streets and listen and watch and learn, to stop by the bureau and inform the Dai of his findings, to see if the information he had discovered matched the information he had. The Dai in Jerusalem didn’t particularly like him, but the grumpy old man didn’t really like anyone.

Ifran was one of those bright young things all men of the previous generation disliked intensely for their vibrant, loud need for exploration and learning and discovery. The Dai had been one of those boys once, of course he had, but marriage and fatherhood had sobered him into a man fond of quills and maps and heady incense the colour of red earth.

On the rooftops now, Ifran ran, leaping and bounding over gaps and loose tiles and gardens, enjoying the chase as much as he enjoyed anything. His assassination had been successful, and his feather bloodied. The Dai would disapprove of his methods, for the Dai always disapproved, but Ifran didn’t care. He had done as the Mentor asked, there was nothing else to be said.

 

 _This isn’t what we wanted, Kirkland. Find a more appropriate memory_.

 

Alfred stirs, skids to a pause atop a roof and wonders how he is stood, in control of a lanky boy several inches shorter than him in height but that much broader in shoulder. The dream had controlled him, swept him away in Ifran’s desires, the smell of hot sand and fresh sweat, and now the boy was confused as to why he had stopped.

Nothing had changed in the timeline, for Ifran soon regains control, his momentary lapse of judgement, of sense, forgotten under the screeches of angered guards, howling for the blood of an infidel they had no right to name such.

Though many of the men chasing him are older, Ifran had been here first, had knelt at the altars of a God he had never believed in, and had prayed for nothing other than a bell to toll to let him down to breakfast. If anybody were the infidel here, it was them, in their chain links and their heavy linens of dirty colours and red crosses.

 

_I’m trying, but the memory here is locked in. It has to be completed. I can’t judge it until we’re already there. Alfred, keep going._

He doesn’t really have much choice; Ifran’s feet have already carried him across the rooftops and down into the bureau’s smouldering heat.

The Dai is, as Alfred had suspected from Ifran’s conflicted feelings, unimpressed, but he accepts the feather with a nod and quiet praise.

After resting up, Ifran returns to Masyaf, hurrying up to the Mentor’s room to announce his victory. Immediately, the Mentor is cutting him off, telling him that there is no victory in the murder of another man.

‘Quiet yourself, Ifran. Think outside of your world. A man is dead.’

‘He is Templar!’ Ifran cries, fists clenched, ‘he was a slaver, supplying the Templars with labour for their war machines! He deserved to die.’

The Mentor looks sad. ‘Did he?’ he asks, ‘how are we to judge a man’s innocence? Are we sure we can say that they deserve death when they are doing what they believe to be right? By that reasoning, do we not deserve to die by the Templars?’

Ifran pauses, and in his back-seat view, Alfred knows there’s something wrong. Ifran’s internal monologue is so hasty, stumbling over itself as it tries to reconcile his path with this sudden doubt of faith from the man who had set him down it, that Alfred knows there is nothing of the man Ifran had known as a boy standing before him – them – now.

‘I don’t understand,’ Ifran says, slow, as if trying to placate an angry cat or a furious housewife with a heavy metal bowl in her hand. ‘They worked with the Templars, they were just as guilty as those in the red crosses. We cannot let known associates stay alive if it means they’re going to just start up the slavery and the murder and the hate all over again! That’s not right at all!’

The Mentor looks at him, so – so – Ifran and Alfred both stop and think.

 

_Alfred, listen to me, alright? You have to let go. You’ll desynchronise if you don’t let Ifran take over all the way. You’re living his life, not watching a movie of it._

Alfred takes a breath and finds that letting go is very hard when there is a nagging feeling in his gut, but he does so anyway, because he is aware of the flickering at the edge of his eyes, the uncomfortable feeling of being pulled out of sleep. So he exhales, and Ifran tells the Mentor that he is just doing what he has been trained to do.

‘I am using my judgement,’ he says, ‘and the men I kill are guilty. The nine men are important to the Templar schemes, if we have a chance of getting them out of our land, we have to get them out of our cities first.’

The Mentor nods, and accepts that Ifran has passed whatever illogical, poorly-thought-out test he threw at him on the sly.

Ifran, confused and a little hollow from the victory torn out of his hands, leaves the library to return to his bed in another part of the fortress.

 

**\+ + F A S T F O R W A R D I N G M E M O R Y + +**

 

Ifran has no hurry to get to Damascus, and rides slow through the valleys. He admires the scenery for the most part, because he knows the route, his senses alert, waiting for an attack from Templars stationed on the track between the major cities.

An eagle soars overhead, cawing and as Ifran shields his eyes, thumb and forefinger gripping his hood to hold it in place, it dives, attacks a smaller bird.

Didn’t those Romans, the olive-skinned, hooked-noses _bastards_ from somewhere far to the west, didn’t they worship the eagle as a sign of greatness? He was sure he’d heard that once. But perhaps it was just one of those stories that had permeated cultures the world over, like how these new metal warriors, these Christian crusaders, they believed everything they were told, like children playing in a dark corner of the village where the adults couldn’t correct their errors.

He thinks a little about the Romans, but there is little to consider; they were many years ago, and the Crusaders are the problem now. The Romans did nothing.

 

_Oh, this is pointless, pull him out. We’ll try again tomorrow._

Ifran continues pondering the nature of the Christian man, and Alfred feels the tug of wakefulness. It makes him ache, and Arthur is whispering behind his ears, soft and familiar, urging him out of the sequence.

Alfred jerks to, almost banging his head on the screen above him. The Animus smells of warm plastic, and the light from the long windows behind the Doctor’s desk is darker now, late afternoon.

‘That’s it for today,’ Arthur says as the Animus disengages with the whine of an old machine.

As Alfred sits up and rubs his temple, he wonders how many people have sat in the Animus.

‘Am I not doing good?’ he asks, and Arthur shakes his head.

‘No, it’s not you. We don’t have the technology developed to search through memories to a precise detail yet. It’s still being worked on. We can narrow it down to a specific period, but not the memory we need. We’ll just have to start working through periods of Ifran’s life until we find what we’re looking for.’

‘What are you looking for?’

Arthur flushes and turns back to the screen next to the Animus, prodding and poking and the computer. ‘Go to bed, Alfred. You need your rest.’

Alfred watches him for some minutes, but when there’s no sign of further conversation, he turns and skulks back into his cell to collapse in bed and sleep.

 

**\+ + E N D C H A P T E R + +**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As before, the dates are important here. Dates will clue you into identities and people and all sorts of other weird and wonderfuls.  
> The quote is used by Al Mualim in AC1, referencing the bible.   
> The film Alfred mentions is The Village (2004) and pretty good from what I remember though I haven’t seen it since it came out oops.  
> Emails are hard to format like heck.  
> As before, some liberties taken with the particulars of Abstergo’s operations, as we never really see the everyday world, and what we know of the world in-game are through Erudito’s hacks, and therefore not trustworthy. So. Liberties.  
> Ifran is an Arabic name meaning “knowledge” or “learning,” which was the closest I could find in terms of meaning and sound to Alfred, an Anglo-Saxon name meaning “elf counsel.” I wanted to keep the same meaning as much as I could in terms of his name, but without keeping him with what amounts to a Christian, and thereby Templar, name in an Arabic and Assassin culture.


End file.
